Roku: We are talking to key partners to bring more UK channels

Roku has told Pocket-lint that the company is talking to all the relevant catch-up services in the UK to bring them to the new Roku box launched in the UK in February.

"The BBC iPlayer is the only catch up service on there at the moment. That will change. We are talking to all the guys you would expect us to talk to," Clive Hudson, head of Roku in Europe told Pocket-lint in a private interview.

Those "guys" presumably include Five, Channel 4, ITV, and Sky with its Sky Go service and possibly the soon to be launched Now TV, however Hudson wouldn't confirm or deny any suggestions we put to him.

He did however confirm that they would like Lovefilm on the Roku box.

"We are talking to all those guys, we would love to have Lovefilm on the box," Hudson added. "We could have waited a bit longer to add more content, but we wanted to just put the product out there and let people see it."

It is a similar model to how Roku launched in the US. Initially a division within Netflix, the company has since branched out hoping to become the defacto for streaming services on your TV, regardless of whether you've got a Smart TV or not.

"In the US when we started we only had one channel and that was Netflix. We just kept adding more partners, we added the channel store and the open SDK that allows people to create new channels and publish them. In the US we are now publishing about one new channel a day on average," Anthony Wood, the company's founder and CEO chimed in.

We met the two Roku execs in London to coincide with a talk Wood was giving about streaming TV.

"By launching it in the UK it will allow developers in the UK to do the same thing. In the US we now have over 450 different channels. We realise that we have less channels in the UK and that is a focus for us to improve."

Stuart has been a tech journalist since 1998 and written for a number of publications around the world. Regularly turning up on television, radio and in newspapers, Stuart has played with virtually every gadget available.